Resumen de Research on children’s reasoning in comparing probabilities

Luis Armando Hernández Solís, María del Carmen Batanero Bernabeu , María Magdalena Gea , Rocío Álvarez Arroyo

• An important change in the recent curricular guidelines for Primary Education is the inclusion of probability content that help model many random phenomena. The success in learning of this topic requires taking into account the children’s capabilities in different stages of their development to work with probability. With the aim of guiding teachers, in this work we summarize the main research on strategies and reasoning levels of children in different ages in comparison of probabilities problems. We first analyse the pioneer work by Piaget and Inhelder and Fischbein, and follow with the analysis of studies performed after these authors. Different models of probabilistic reasoning levels, as well as associated strategies, and the main variables that affect the difficulty of comparing probabilities are described and the possible implications on teaching.